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Going to this, the second annual Dedbeat weekender, was something of a risk, for both me and my comrade T Eljay. Although both experienced festival goers, this was our first venture into a dance/hip-hop festival. Having only recently seriously got into, for want of a better phrase, "intelligent dance music", the only artists featured that I realy wanted to see were Aphex Twin, Andrew Weatherall and Doug E Fresh and The Get Fresh Crew, on account of the fact that when I was a boy my brother had a single of theirs called "The Show" which sampled the Inspector Gadget theme tune. However, a festival is a festival, summer seems eons away, AND we get a caravan to stay in (albeit with four strangers), AND its an excuse to avoid work and dive headfirst into a variety of drugs and drink. Word.
So there T Eljay and I were, in a caravan in February in Great Yarmouth. To use the parlance of our times, "Big up" Dedbeat for providing us with such lovely accomodation AND a TV with their own channel. All this without any corporate backing. After several hours of smoking top-quality skunk and drinking rum and vodka, it was easy to forget that only minutes away from us was a whole holiday camp full of all manner of entertainment. A nice young man and his psychotic female friend (who seemed very wound up about fresh bruising on her forehead) accidentally popped by and sold us some pills and eventually our "housemates" arrived. The element of trusting four strangers in our caravan had been somewhat of a worry, but luckily they seemed as respectable as us. After getting to know our new friends, we took some of our medication and ventured forth into the unknown territory of Dedbeat....
And it was good! I haven't been to a holiday camp in over ten years, and then my body was certainly not this toxic and the music wasn't this good and beautiful people weren't to be found in every direction. The only thing missing was a fat northern comedian. We'd made it in to see The Herbaliser, who we had been told were "wicked". And they were. From here on in the night sort of blended into one long soul/jazz/funk FREAKOUT MAAAAAAAANNNN!!!! It felt, as T Eljay put it, like 4 in the morning outside Joe Bananas Blanket Stall at Glastonbury. I kept forgetting we had carpet beneath our feet and a roof above our heads. Even better was the realisation that I was drunk/stoned/on speed/on a pill and had been blessed that night with superhuman powers to switch between the four at will. T Eljay chatted to some 17-year old kid who knew more about "the scene" then we ever will, while I silently revelled in my new found powers.
At one point we stared at the screens by the stage and there was footage from the sixties of a soul band on some TV show with the crowd strutting their funky shit. Except it wasn't from the sixties, it was the here and now and we were a part of it and it felt good. We watched freaky dancers popping their bodies and decided we should have a go. It was probably a bad idea to dent the goodwill all around us with not-too-subtle sarcasm and spastic movements, but in the early hours of Saturday morning it felt right. We tried to find the Rephlex room, but all we could find was the Mong Bar, and we had no time to mong, so we missed Weatherall and settled for the excellent 4 Hero.
At about 5am we freestyled our way back to our caravan, except it wasn't our caravan and it was full of dodgy looking people gathered in a circle. Dont know what all that was about. When we found our caravan one of our housemates was there laid out. As we entered he looked at us in fear and confusion, shouted a random thought and fled. And so we ended the first day listening to Nick Drake. Perhaps the most wonderous thing of this wonderful day was then texting Dedbeat TV asking them if they could make porn come on my television. Less than a minute later a pair of breasts appeared on our screen with the message "DONE". We were astounded. Ladies and gentlemen, the future of festivals is here...
